Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Visualisation tool for student social network

The Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP) is a software tool from University of Wollongong which shows who talks to who in a student discussion forum. I tried it with the Moodle forums in my Green ICT course and, not surprisingly, it showed myself at the center of the network. The tool also works with BlackBoard /WebCT and operates via a Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer web browser.

As it is the tool is interesting, but perhaps a little too sophisticated for the average teacher. I would prefer something which would give me a tabular summary, rather than an interactive 3D graphic. A simple table could tell you which are the students not engaging in discussion, the key information brokers, provide some learning community metrics, and some input for marking.

Also the security issues with the software are not clear. Is the data from the password protected course web site being transmitted to University of Wollongong, or is the processing being done locally on my computer?

Shane's work (now being done at UBC) on SNAPP drove the development of the tool...

The presentation of the visual connections seemed more intuitive to us as a sociogram rather than the tabular listing of 'distances' between individuals. Of course,you can get that list by exporting the data in several formats (comma delimited for Excel, GraphML, or VNA (NetDraw).

The tool is effectively screen scraping the structure of the discussion thread for each compatible LMS platform (Bb, Moodle, WebCT). As such, if you have permission to see the discussion thread, then you can invokethe javascript plug-in on your browser toolbar to create the graphic representations of the message exchange patterns in the thread. Nothing is being drawn from the course LMS installed software environment.